


on a dreamer's holiday

by Anonymississippi



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: A Killing Eve Christmas, Christmas in New York, Cons and Swindles, F/F, Kisses and shopping and ice skating, That's right folks we've got instrospection we've got cons we've got murder mentions, gift-giving, picks up after 3x08 if 3x08 occured in like... early October, there is an attempt at plot but it's really just an excuse for them to take a holiday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:48:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28233426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: Eve should not feel this giddy about teaching Villanelle to ice-skate, especially when she's 95% sure she just cut a man's ear off.ORThe one where Villanelle arranges a Christmas holiday while on the run from the Twelve. Villanelle wants hot chocolates, strolls in the snow, and for the CCTV to be cut off the exterior alley doors in the Diamond District. Eve wants Villanelle.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 69
Kudos: 209





	1. Chapter 1

In the months since Kenny’s death, Eve was working on being okay with being part-monster. 

The word echoed off of metallic walls in the Forest of Dean. Reverberated, like gongs and cymbals at the climax of a symphony, in her head at the worst of times. But her monster had found its little monster soulmate, and they’d been dancing through the trails of bodies in their wakes ever since. 

She thinks back to the better-looking monster, sad and confused in her mustard-bow coat, turning on the bridge, gradually, before the slow, inevitable trudge back to each other. Eve had never seen her so uncertain; had never seen her so relieved. When they met again, shrugged their shoulders, and started walking alongside each other, Eve decided she was done avoiding Villanelle. Done rationalizing, done making excuses.

She still felt guilty about it ( _old habits_ ), but at least this time she was trying not to.

They were not good people; the best they could shoot for was… less bad.

Eve harbored no delusions of purity or goodness or utilitarian behavior patterns. She was the woman she always was, but magnified. Bill had seen the edges of it, the mutation, and had pulled her back. But the creeping euphoria engendered by her hand, floating ghost-like and purposeful before her, was heady and unshakeable. She remembers the barely-there press of her fingers into the spine of a rude man on a train platform, and what could’ve happened if she let her monster play on its own. 

Broken glass at a bus stop; the press of a pen tip against the fleshy chunk of her palm. The creak of Dasha’s ribs underfoot. The suctiony, wet mist of blood from Raymond’s head. The thrill manifested tenfold with every escape, every flight, train, taxi, ferry; she shoved candy and cereal that didn’t belong to her into her mouth in excess, her money dwindling but her skin brighter and her head clearer than it had been in years.

It disgusted her.

It invigorated her.

Her adrenaline highs were so high these days, she slept soundly through the nights. 

No more screaming.

Or, maybe that had something to do with occasionally waking to someone who seemed like they were coming off the tail end of their own psychological reckoning.

Villanelle was not a pretty sleeper, nor a generous one. The mattress was hers, the covers were hers, and the remote was hers. She’d scroll with her screen on the brightest setting well past midnight, the blue light reflecting in the wet roundness of her eyes. She looked at clothes, usually. Sometimes searched through Google maps, or a mysterious black screen with green html code that reminded Eve of _The Net_.

_ “Have you ever seen The Net?” _

_ “What?” _

_ “The Net? The movie, with Sandra Bullock?” _

_ “My second favorite Sandra.” _

_ “What?” _

_ “Nothing.” _

_ “So… have you seen it?” _

_ “Uh… no, is it on Netflix?” _

_ “I don’t know, I had a video of it—” _

_ “Video?” _

_ “VHS.” _

_ “What’s a—” _

_“I know you know what a VHS is, stop being an asshole.”_

These were their nightly conversations after their days spent apart, or sporadically together; it was not wise for them to be together as much as they were, probably, but choices were choices and they found that they rather enjoyed each other's company when they weren't trying to kill each other. 

That didn’t mean politically-motivated threats and machiavellian interests couldn’t track them like wolves pursuing skittish, wine-dependent rabbits, but it did mean that they at least made the effort at truth and presence and a check-in phone call when they knew it was safe.

In the grander scheme of things, Eve and Villanelle both understood they had differing skill sets, which necessitated time apart. But, they always, always ended up returning, circling orbits and wayward gravities eventually colliding into something rather brilliant. 

Eve would check into a hotel and let Villanelle in through a window, snatch a stolen USB from her hand that Villanelle had taken immense care to retrieve from behind enemy lines. Or, maybe Villanelle would check in and Eve would come through the staff entrance, hair a frizzy, mushroom cloud of knots, tangled from running her fingers through it all day as she paced in front of a white board. Maybe they met up in a hostel, and Villanelle would get the top bunk because she would whine otherwise, and Eve would spread her files over the foot of her bed until Villanelle popped her head over the side to tell her she was “shuffling pages too loudly,” because apparently that’s a _thing_.

Two beds most times, one bed in a pinch, or, in more embarrassing instances, they’d both be reclined in a business class seat— _I don’t care if we’re on the run, I am not flying_ economy, _Eve_ —and then one of them would be drooling on the other person’s shoulder. Eve would catch herself; force herself to remember something endearing could be equally gross. 

They didn’t cuddle and there wasn’t any touching or kissing or sex or that really intense staring thing that they’d perfected in most one-on-one interactions; honestly, there really wasn’t much time for thinking further than the next file ahead of them, but damn it if Eve wasn’t resting a little easier knowing that the someone Villanelle was out to get wasn’t _her_ , since Villanelle… well… kind of already had her?

For three weeks when money was tight, Eve went back to London and crashed on the Bitter Pill couch. By day, she followed up on leads that Villanelle sent her concerning the Twelve, Bear and Jamie keeping a wide berth when the shower situation became untenable. By night, she lathered white, pleasant-smelling powder under her pits and made triple what she had in the kitchen in New Malden by slinging drinks in a hotel bar. She tapped into old college skills she swore she’d never go back to—but arguing with rich drunk folks who leered at her cleavage and sneered at last call was, not surprisingly, a helluva lot easier to deal with now that she’d murdered someone. 

Or, maybe two someones. One and half, with Villanelle’s help. Every now and then when she got a little heavy-handed with the sticky-sweet grenadine, she’d have to wrestle down a dry heave and keep a waste basket handy.

Apparently that much red was a trigger, and _axe-Raymond-Villanelle-with-a-gun_ was not completely behind her, as if it ever could be.

On Eve's fourth week at the bar, itchy in the little black vest and embroidered apron, she caught familiar eyes tracking her movements. She felt a little nervous as her hands curled around the handle of a strainer; distracted, knowing Villanelle was following her elbow up and down as she danced about with ice and liquor in the shaker.

“God,” Villanelle scoffed loudly, “who do I have to kill to get a drink around here?”

“Allow me. Hey, hey barkeep!”

Eve purposefully ignored the American suit perched over Villanelle’s shoulder, taking her time as she finished a martini and pouring a hefty helping of Chardonnay for the pair of women at the opposite end of the bar. They smiled and Eve lingered, asking after them before slowly wiping her hands with a towel and tossing it over her shoulder. She eventually turned to the exasperated man who had failed to impress Villanelle with his inability to order a drink on her behalf.

Eve was feeling… something. Not giddy exactly, but Villanelle looked great and had made a bit of an effort to drop in, lest she would’ve text Eve on the burner, and this guy looked just obnoxious enough for them both to have a little fun. And these days, strapped for cash until such a time as Villanelle could settle into obscurity, men like Suit offered rife opportunity for thrilling little cons. Eve was getting better, and Villanelle was getting prouder.

“Hi,” Eve said, placing two cocktail napkins in front of Villanelle and Suit. “What can I get for you? Actually, you know what, let me guess—”

Villanelle’s brow arched in amusement and she sat a little straighter, awaiting her cue.

“You’re her, aren’t you?” Eve said, widening her eyes a little. “They told me the swimsuit mogul from Sydney was staying here. You seem like a Bushwhacker kind of girl to me. You like drinks _and_ dessert.”

Villanelle laughed, and immediately caught the plot.

“Guilty, I’m afraid,” Villanelle slid into an Australian accent with ease, crossing one knee over the other and leaning against the back of the bar stool. “To the swimsuit bit, that is. Can’t be downing bushwhackers left and right when they want you to pose for your own line.”

“Oh, I bet,” Eve feigned her awe, and reached for the Stoli. “Vodka on the rocks, then?”

“Why—yes, yes exactly,” Villanelle replied. “Very good. Thank you, uhm—”

“Eve.”

“Eve,” Villanelle let her lips slide over the syllable, and batted her eyelashes as Eve placed her drink in front of her. When Villanelle reached her hand out for the glass, Eve found the ploy.

“Are these the Cartier?” Eve asked, eyes aglow as she tugged her hand away from the trio of bangles encircling Villanelle’s wrist. “From the _Harper’s Bazaar_ piece?”

“They…” Villanelle’s mouth hung open, a little awed, a lot cheeky, but that glint of _something_ was quickly quashed to keep up the story. “They are. Don’t tell my publicist, but I couldn’t part with them. Wardrobe let me write them a check and it was a damn steal.”

“They were quoted—”

“Oh, I know,” Villanelle smiled. “Are you a jewelry girl yourself, Eve?”

“I wish,” Eve said, even though she’d really never had much taste for jewelry. “But I work with my hands so much—”

“Quite skillfully, it looks like.”

“Uhm… uh, yeah, I—” and now Eve was the one who’d lost the trajectory of this— _what exactly were they trying to_ —oh yeah, Suit, not so obviously watching the exchange unfold. “I’d just ruin anything as nice as those. Not like I’ve got thirty thousand quid lying around.”

Suit’s eyes went wide.

_ Jackpot. _

Eve pulled a rocks glass from a shelf and shoveled some ice in it.

“Hey, uhm, I wanted to get a—”

“Bourbon and coke, right?” Eve cut the suit off, reaching for a mid-shelf liquor.

He, too, was taken aback.

“Yeah, how did you—”

“You just look like a bourbon and coke kind of guy.” (He did not—he looked like he once downed jagerbombs in college and date-raped his best friend’s sister; but, he had been at the bar Wednesday, and had ordered the same thing all night with his coworkers from the pharma conference. Eve was simply observant.)

Eve reached for the soda gun, her thumb hovering above a button. “Unless you wanted diet?”

“What?” the man said, looking down at himself. “No, just… Coke is fine.”

“Alright then,” Eve said, giving a pointed glance at him and then Villanelle. “Enjoy.”

“I’m Stephen,” the guy said, turning his attention back toward Villanelle. “And you are—?”

“Samantha,” Villanelle said, and with that, Eve had to pretend not to listen.

She attended to three other customers who came up to the bar, opened tabs, closed out one couple and noted a 25% tip, which was nice, she guessed. Not paying rent and hostel fees had made her feel a little better, if not entirely safe, but Villanelle had assured her that her latest longer trip was necessary to throw a wrench into the Twelve’s tracking of her movements, and, to get some much-needed funding for further evasion. She’d return when she was safe and then, the pair of them, along with the connections they’d made and the tech they’d ‘borrowed’ from MI6, would hunker down in hiding and make a plan.

A real plan this time.

Not a, _lying low then puddle jumping from country to country, border to border, bed to bed, never taking more than a day or three to be together to discuss whatever the hell was going on between, around, and inside of them,_ plan. 

Not that either of them would admit to anything as human as feeling, or anything as realistic as being scared. The Twelve were there, and they’d come to the unspoken conclusion that until they were dealt with or far enough away that Hélène and her henchmen could be momentarily forgotten, they weren’t going to talk about them.

But the pair of monsters needed several thousand Euros for the flights and the train to the safe-house in Croatia, which… Eve had been working on. She had. But no matter how low her top was cut and no matter how many extra shifts she picked up, it wasn’t like she was killing for money. And Villanelle’s stockpiles were there, but not accessible without some form of tracing; she’d even taken Eve to a safe house she swore the Twelve didn’t know about.

But on their second day in the moderately-sized Swiss cottage, Konstantin text Villanelle something cryptic; so, to be safe, she insisted they relocate once again. It was a little exhausting, really, unlike the day-to-day of ice in shakers and toothpicks in cherries behind a bar. Eve had a couch in a relatively secure building waiting for her when she was done, and even if it wasn’t comfortable, it would do.

They needed something though; one more job, one big con, and then maybe, just maybe, they’d have enough money to lie low and skim from Carolyn’s secret stash to live just above the poverty line.

“Thank you, Stephen,” Eve heard Villanelle say, dragging her out of her mental spiral.

Villanelle made a show of slinging her purse over her shoulder, her hair flowing in a golden wave of curls. A new look, one Eve had never seen before.

“Excuse me? What about that G&T?”

Eve had to pull her eyes away from staring.

“I need the loo… powder my nose and all,” Eve heard Villanelle say. She watched the swish of patterned slacks and the baby blue silk button-up as Villanelle retreated.

She wasn't gone long. 

Eve took five immediately after Villanelle got back and resumed her flirtation with Stephen. She found the bangles in the second women’s stall, looped together on the back of the door with the coat hanger, a little note attached.

_ Give me “more” vodka. Then it’s on you. _

Eve took a deep breath, tucked the bracelets into her apron, and went back to work.

* * *

Men will do anything to get laid.

Or maybe it wasn’t even men, but people, in general, when Villanelle turned her attention wholly toward them. It was a little hypnotic, and Eve was good enough at lying to herself to swear that she hadn’t been affected by that mesmerizing stare before, or the brush of fingers on her forearm, or the twitch of lips and the cluster of freckles that were only apparent if you were close, personal, and very, very out of your depth.

Four more “vodka tonics” for Samantha-the-sun-cream-heiress and Stephen was halfway undressed already. Tie loosened, top two buttons undone, his hair a little mussed from when he’d run his hands through it after his third bourbon and coke. And he kept _touching_ her.  


The giggling got louder, and the touching a little more gratuitous, and Eve told herself that the _Kill Bill_ sirens going off in her head every time Stephen ducked to whisper in Villanelle’s ear were stupid, and really poorly named given Villanelle’s history. Villanelle never did stuff like this with her kills, or so Eve had gathered; so, it was annoying that she had to resort to it for smaller cash grabs. Even more annoying that Eve had to bear witness to it.

She wasn’t jealous, she lied to herself.

“…but you’re married.”

Eve heard Villanelle tut in that thick Sydney accent, rocking her head from side to side and feigning a drunken flirtation that could really only be effective on a heterosexual male with a career in finance or sales. Profiling was admittedly different than making blanket generalizations, but, from Eve's experience, about 95% of those generalizations turned out accurate. And if Villanelle could just finagle something out of him…

“…if you can find me, then I’ll know it’s worth it,” Villanelle trilled, and shakily rose to her feet. With a coy glance, she dragged her fingers along Stephen’s shoulders and headed for the elevator. Stephen, despite the drinking, looked like he was ready to explode.

Eve was discreet at first, pulling the trinkets from her apron and trying to “hide” them from anyone’s gaze at the bar. Stephen just sat there, dazed.

Through a series of increasingly unlikely acts of clumsiness, Eve eventually got his attention, all but spilling a shaker of ice in his lap as she flashed Villanelle’s bracelets in her free hand.

“Hey!” Stephen slurred a little, connecting a dot or two in that poor, alcohol-addled brain of his. “Those are Samantha’s bracelets!” he said, like he’d just come to a major revelation. He could now insist the conductor stop the train, call Scotland Yard, and impress the girl with his smarts.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eve said

“But… those aren’t—hey!”

“Sir, I’m going to have to cut you off.”

“I’m going to c-call the—the—police—!”

Eve had never considered herself much of an actor, but she at least had the advantage of stone-cold sobriety.

_ Hey, listen, wait, let me take my break and we’ll… we’ll work out a deal. _

_ What kind of deal? _

_ I’ll sell you one. _

_ One what? _

_ Bracelet. _

_ What do you—? _

_ Meet me in the alley behind the kitchen in ten minutes. _

_ I don’t want a— _

_ I’ll tell you which room she’s staying in. _

_ … did you say in the alley? _

* * *

“Forty-six, f-forty-seven, forty…s-seven—”

“That’s forty-eight, dude.”

“Forty-eight, forty-nine, five thousand,” Stephen pushed the final hundred pound note into Eve’s hands, and took the bracelets from her.

“You can get a box at one of the shops off the high street, just north,” Eve said, gesturing out of the alleyway with her chin. “Your wife will never know.”

“Right, uh… but you said you knew where she was staying?”

“What?”

“Samantha,” poor Stephen looked ready to weep. “Her room number.”

“Oh,” Eve said, “Right. She’s on floor seven, uh… Princess Suite. It’s on the east end.”

Stephen got clocked in the shoulder by a dumpster as he stumbled back for the main entrance of the hotel, all but jogging around the corner to get back upstairs to his destiny-fuck with Samantha.

“You look sexy in that vest.”

“Piss off,” Eve called, her expletive forming a cloud of white-grey mist in the cold.

“Absolutely delectable,” Villanelle continued, emerging from the shadows. “And the apron? God, add a bowtie and I would’ve climbed over the bar.

“Stephen might’ve had something to say about that.”

“Stephen can go fuck himself.”

“Looks like he’ll have to, since you’re not on the seventh floor.”

Villanelle make a _pfft_ sound, and sauntered forward. “Can’t believe you got him to trek all the way to the ATM.”

“It’s across the street,” Eve said. “He really thought he had a shot.”

“Bless,” Villanelle said in a homely British accent. Her smile grew lecherous when she saw the wad of bills in Eve’s hand. “How’d you play it?”

“Encouraged him to buy a present for his wife, resale the others. I think he was experiencing some future spousal guilt because he wanted to screw you so badly. If he bought her a treat, it was like a hall pass, or something.”

“How much?”

“Five.”

“Hundred?”

“Five thousand.”

“Wow, how strong was that bourbon you poured?” she joked, removing the money from Eve’s frozen grip. Eve just blinked at her empty palm, still stunned at how easy it had been; how quickly she’d been able to recover, to take Stephen’s money and know it wasn’t for a mortgage or a gas bill or groceries—well, maybe groceries, Villanelle had been on an ice cream kick despite the plummeting temperatures.

_ And I bet you drink hot cocoa in the summer. _

_ There are no rules about when you can eat certain foods and drink certain drinks, Eve. Why place limitations on happiness? _

_ Don’t get philosophical on me. _

_ I would never. Do you want the pistachio? _

_ It’s two degrees out here. _

_ Raspberry Ripple, then? _

“Five thousand quid,” Eve mumbled, noting the blue tinge crawling over her skin. The veins of her wrist and knuckles stood tall against the back of her hand in prominent relief, little purple-black rivers of blood constricting in the cold.

“How about we go find something nice to spend it on?” Villanelle said, her own breath white and steamy. In her camel trench, blond hair down, uncharacteristically styled wild and curly as Eve’s, she looked like a fashionable, smoke-breathing lion.

“Uhm, no,” Eve said immediately, her brow furrowing. “We’ve got to get to the safe house.”

“Carolyn said she was still waiting to secure it.”

“So we sit tight and make it last in the meantime. We should be able to lie low for a week or two with that and still afford the tickets—”

“What, you mean these tickets?” Villanelle asked, producing two first-class plane passes.

“LaGuardia?! What the hell?”

“Well, I’m not flying into Newark.”

“Newark… Jersey? Wait, why are you flying—”

“We’re flying! There’s two of us, Eve.”

“Why are we going to America?” Eve asked, her eyes scanning over the dates and departure times—t _omorrow, of-fucking-course_ —but they were in the first boarding group and Eve hadn’t flown first-class anywhere since her fifth anniversary. But really, none of that even mattered, because they were supposed to be prepping for lying low on the Med; not traipsing across the ocean so Villanelle could treat herself to a Fifth Avenue shopping spree.

“Christmas in New York,” Villanelle said, snatching the boarding passes from Eve’s grip and shoving them into her pocket. “It’s magical in the movies.”

“It is slush,” Eve said, thinking of high school field trips packed into school buses and cramming in and out of doorways at the American Museum of Natural History. She remembered her socks soaked through her boots and her pants-legs dripping from splash back of icy-muddy-gunk from yellow taxi tires. David Sherbatsky had tried to hold her hand on the bus but she wouldn’t stop turning pages in the _Encyclopedia of Serial Killers_ she’d picked up from the library at the community college. “Slush and early-onset hypothermia,” Eve continued.

“Russian,” Villanelle said, as if that were an argument.

“It’s loud.”

“So is London. So is Paris, for that matter, and don’t get me started on Barcelona during the high season—”

“Everything smells vaguely of piss.”

“Again, Eve, you found me in Paris, so…”

“What is this about?”

“Christmas,” Villanelle said guilelessly, “with you.”

Eve grunted, and rolled her eyes. “Bullshit.”

“And… maybe a job. Or two. Very quick, I promise.”

“But I thought—”

“Big jobs, Eve,” Villanelle reassured her, pressing off from the wall to take Eve’s bare hands between her own. She rubbed her leather gloves over Eve’s fingers, kneading them gently. “Not just enough to get us to Croatia. Enough to get us there and keep us there, for longer than a while. Even if Carolyn drops us.”

“Why would she?”

Villanelle sighed, and looked skyward. “Do you trust Carolyn?”

“I—”

“Think carefully,” Villanelle interrupted, the steady pressure of her gloved fingers working warmth and mobility and capable life back into Eve’s extremities. Eve didn’t want to think too hard on that idea, about feeling wide awake after sleeping for so long, even if she had to work through the pain and discomfort of pins and needles pricking her body back to feeling. She didn’t want to think of all the overly solicitous touching they’d engaged in over the past couple of months, despite avoiding talks of buses and kisses and tea dances.

“If it came down to it? Really...something big?” Eve qualified, mind drifting back to Carolyn. “No,” she shook her head. “I suppose I don’t.”

She pulled her hands away from Villanelle’s grip, unable to continue standing so close in the cold. Her cheeks were flushed. She could blame it on the wind; but the truth of it was, after having not seen Villanelle for so long, she didn’t really want to let her out of her sight again. And if that meant a week in New York, at Christmastime… well, Eve had certainly experienced worse holidays.

“What about me?”

“What about you?” Eve chattered, crossing her arms and shoving her hands under her armpits.

“Do you trust me?” Villanelle asked, her fingers twitching at her sides, palm flat against the long coat and the pocket where she’d stashed the boarding passes. Eve noticed that she kept touching her side, as if to check that the passes remained there; as if they, and with them, Eve, might float away on the frigid wind, and her Christmas dreams of the Nutcracker at the Met or throwing bird seed on petty thieves or, like… whatever the hell else happened in New York at Christmastime would be dashed, all because she lost her tickets. 

It was thoughtful and endearing and Eve really wanted to scoff at the sincerity of it all. It was entirely _Villanelle_.  


“I trust you to be exactly who I know you to be,” Eve said.

Villanelle tilted her head. “I do not think I like that answer.”

“It’s the best you’re going to get,” Eve returned, brushing off the moment and heading back for the street. “Now do you have a room somewhere or are you bunking with me on the office floor?”

Villanelle groaned her protest and followed, echoes of her boot heels bouncing off the stone alley walls.

* * *

“This is a masterpiece.”

“Seventy-odd holiday cinema selections before you, and you go with _Bad Santa_?”

“It is funny, Eve, shh! I have not seen—” Villanelle didn't finish her thought, because she snorted.

_ Snorted! _

The mannerisms and the behavioral tics felt like treats, special little candies or surprise biscuits dropped down every now and then for Eve to gobble up, feasting on the complex meal of Villanelle. She had stuffed herself on the history, the psychopathy, the patterns of her career; but these glimpses into the personal were the bits Eve had always wanted to sink her teeth into, one way or another. And these days, hovering around Villanelle more and more, in situations professional and domestic, it was really hard to distinguish imagination from reality and not just press her mouth against skin and finally, finally take her fill.

“Excuse me, could I get another gin and tonic?” Eve asked a passing flight attendant, who smiled and went back for the Clubhouse bar. Villanelle was engrossed in her movie, so Eve fiddled with the amenity packet before pulling out her laptop.

In-flight wifi was new, and Bear had done his best with the techno-wizardry to get her a computer that “outstripped MI6 security standards on every level,” according to Jamie. And even with Bear’s Tangfastic-tinted lips and stained undershirt, Eve had to give credit where it was due. She and Villanelle had corresponded for weeks with no technological hiccups, even with sensitive information on the Twelve, and Konstantin, and sometimes even Carolyn passing between them. Carolyn was cc’d on emails Eve deemed relevant to her, but she’d learned her lesson in Rome, and the fall-out with Paul had ultimately solidified her resolve: have a plan B, maybe a plan C, and, when in doubt, _do not trust Carolyn_.

So that left her trusting Villanelle, which, while not necessarily better, at least got her the upgrade from Economy to Upper Class.

“Your drink, miss,” the flight attendant said.

Eve took the glass in hand as she booted up, noting the little **XMAS** document icon she’d started two weeks ago, when she was missing Villanelle (but would not tell her), and wondering if (hoping) she would be back in time for the holiday. 

She clicked on her special project, casting her glance over the top of her device toward Villanelle. She was still fixated on her film, a red licorice stick dangling from the corner of her lips, an open magazine strewn across her lap and her feet crossed at the ankles. The picture of leisure travel. Eve would finish up her little Christmas project and then pull up the records on the mysterious Hélène. There was supposed to be more information waiting for her in the safe house, once it was ready for them. But Eve saw no problem in getting a bit of a head start, a little independent research work to pass the time.

Eve watched the cursor blink over the little movie ticket clip art she’d found without a watermark. She grimaced.

Her independent research work is what got her into all of this with Villanelle in the first place: typing up a Christmas present... in first class... on her way to a swanky holiday in New York City, all while Villanelle went off to kill someone and Eve sat dutifully behind, pouring over MI6 files and mounds of Bitter Pill public records requests.

Eve took another sip of her drink, and tried not to spiral.

An hour later, Villanelle tugged her headphones down and caught Eve’s eye.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Eve answered absently.

“You have been working very hard over there.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anything that concerns me?”

“Not at the moment, unless you’d like to know about some secondary educational records of your French matron crush.”

“Don’t be coy, Eve, you know I would.”

Eve shot Villanelle a murder-eyes stare over the top of her computer as the drinks service made another round. Villanelle stole Eve’s pretzels, attention diverted between snacks and the glossy feel of fashion magazine pages underneath her fingertips. Eve was about to give up on the most recent CCTV images when something caught her eye.

“Holy shit.”

“Hmm?”

“I think I found—I don’t know what I found.”

“Konstantin once said this about a rash,” Villanelle mumbled, squenching up her face. “He said it was on the scalp, but there was this trail of red down his neck—”

“No—shut up, look at this.” Eve twisted the computer around on her little table, pulling up the image so that Villanelle could see as she knelt across the aisle. A flight attendant tripped over Villanelle’s foot, and she responded with a clipped, “Oh, I am _so sorry_!”, much to Eve’s surprise. Villanelle even helped to pull the other woman to her feet, caressing her elbow in the exchange.

Eve did not suddenly feel angry for no reason. The sirens were not going off in her head again. She was angry because of the picture, and flushed from the alcohol.

That was it.

“It is best to not piss off the people bringing you things on boats or airplanes,” Villanelle explained, settling back in next to Eve. “Unless you know how to operate the vehicle yourself. And, while I can do some phenomenal stuff with a Cessna and a jet-ski—”

“Will you just look?” Eve asked, pointing toward the blurry head of an older woman.

“Who is that?”

“That’s Carolyn’s boss.”

“Who?”

“MI6.”

“Obviously.”

“And who is that?!” Eve asked, as if instructing a child to put two-and-two together.

“Hélène,” Villanelle answered, her gaze flitting between the two women sipping champagne at the black-and-white cocktail table. It was a regular old security photo, and the pair were meeting in plain sight. Men and women with conference lanyards darted past them as Eve brought up a longer clip of the CCTV tape. There was a folder on the table between them, but the footage was too grainy to make much out, and Eve didn’t have Bear’s enhancing software installed on the loaner laptop.

Villanelle rolled her eyes and groaned as she watched the exchange. “Ugh, shit. Where was this?”

“Hamburg, 2018.”

“What for?”

“Not sure,” Eve muttered, scanning the file title. “EU Peace exhibition or something?”

“Hélène is many things, but not peaceful.”

“I don’t know much about Carolyn’s boss, but I’ve heard she’s worse.”

Villanelle’s eyes widened incredulously. “Than Hélène? Or Carolyn?”

“All I know is, her turns of phrase are… intense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something about comparing…” Eve dropped her voice a bit. “Getting fucked up the bum to missions gone sideways.”

“Wait,” Villanelle blinked, then shook her head. “Is Carolyn the one doing the fucking?”

“It’s an expression,” Eve grumbled. “Listen, Paul infiltrated MI6, but he had to have been hired by someone,” Eve murmured, rubbing the heel of her hand into her eye socket. They’d been in the air for nearly four hours, but still had another four to go. “I just… when does it all end?”

“What?”

“Just… all of it,” Eve said. “It doesn’t stop when we go to Russia, or Paris, or Rome, or Barcelona—”

“Or New York.”

“Or New York, apparently,” Eve sighed. “Every second I think I make progress I find out it all goes higher up. It’s exhausting.”

“But you like it.”

Eve closed her eyes and her laptop, then took a long, steadying breath. She folded her table tray into the seat back and stowed her files in her messenger bag. “I think we both know that just because we like something, it doesn’t make it good for us.”

Villanelle’s grin grew wide and hungry.

“That wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”

“Sure you didn’t, Eve,” Villanelle said, giving Eve’s knee a squeeze as she stood back up and returned to her seat. Eve would’ve felt a lot better if Villanelle wasn’t practically glowing from the inadvertent acknowledgement of… of whatever she felt. Eve hadn’t entirely figured it out herself, and was a little resentful that Villanelle seemed so happy over a sentiment that was ambiguous at best.

“I will reiterate,” Villanelle said, more serious now, “You know how to make it stop.”

“But… but isn’t there like… these people are toying with international issues, bigger things than me or you, or—”

“Eve,” Villanelle leaned forward, her elbows pressed to her knees, her hands clasped together. The gentle purple glow of the backing light from the inflight-entertainment console made her look a little otherworldly, 40,000 feet in the air. Eve mirrored her position, knowing she probably didn’t look ethereal or divine herself, but all of these new feelings for Villanelle and discoveries from MI6 made her head feel water-logged.

“You haven’t been on your high horse for a long while now,” Villanelle began, her hushed tone hard to hear over the drone of the engines. “It is a shame to watch you try to crawl back up there.”

“This is bigger than some little con.”

“This is you justifying your interest and wrong-doing, which I’m sure Carolyn, Hélène, and MI6 boss lady could also do. Stop if you want to stop. Or keep going, but don’t pretend you are clicking away for any reason other than you wanting to know what comes of it. You do this with things. Your ghost lady. Your friend, Kevin, when he died. You and I—”

“You know that’s—that’s not—” Eve sucked in a breath, wondering if she was really ready to make things a bit more… uhm, _explicit?_ than she had in the past. She was a master of tip-toeing around half-truths to hide her own motivations and vulnerabilities. 

But the mirror of Villanelle wasn’t exactly forgiving, so why not try candor for once?

“Listen, I… if the Twelve disappeared completely, all traces of their connections with MI6…” here, Eve dropped her voice to a whisper, “…assassinations, accidents, whatever, you know I would still be here, because you are here, and that’s that. You’re the choice I make every time, and you—we, sorry—we both need to accept that.”

“When you say it that way… it sounds like you are still trying to convince yourself.”

“Maybe I am,” Eve admitted, reaching for her glass. The ice clinked as she drained it, then pursed her lips before continuing. “But me saying it out loud… I don’t know, especially to you, gives me some accountability to stand by it. Even when I’m scared. Or think I’m losing it.”

“Why let me be your accountability?”

“Because you have the contrary quality that makes me want to do things that make you proud and things that spite you at the same time,” Eve said, truthfully. “After everything, I...I genuinely… I like you, you know?”

“Even when I have to resort to…” Villanelle screwed up her face like she had just smelled something foul. “Freelance?”

“I don’t think you’d actually be freelancing for the money if the Twelve weren’t still on your ass, so, yeah… I mean, I’ve made my choice. Whether or not a terrifying crime organization has anything to do with it, it’s still, uh, you. So… get used to it?”

“Why did that sound like a question?”

Eve could try to answer it, but she was three drinks into a flight and her head was starting to hurt from staring at the screen for two hours. “Because you’re an asshole, that’s why.”

“Lighten up, Eve,” Villanelle said, beaming as she leaned back in her seat. “It is Christmas, after all.”


	2. Chapter 2

As they deboarded their flight and searched signs overhead for baggage claim, Eve resolved to commit to them a little more blatantly. Looking down, she took Villanelle’s hand in her own like she’d done it a million times before.

Yes, there were tons of people milling between gates and security and restaurants and yes, Villanelle was walking the wrong direction towards the Cinnabon stall, but still… Eve grabbed her hand.

“Thank you for the ticket,” Eve said as they shuffled past other travelers. “I haven’t flown first-class in a very long time.” She squeezed Villanelle’s fingers, and enjoyed the way her lips quirked upward.

“You’re welcome, Eve.”

“Baggage claim is this way.”

“But Cinnabon—”

“This way, Villanelle.”

* * *

Coming off of nearly five weeks on the Bitter Pill couch, Hotel Solstice was damn-near utopia. Before Villanelle could even start complaining about how the black-out curtains were ebony and not onyx or whatever the hell rich people complained about when they stayed in chic-as-shit hotels, Eve was running a bath in the free-standing tub in the en-suite, ready to wash the grime of air travel (and a couple of days of Wet-Ones sponge baths) off of her person.

She ignored the mini-bar, and the little Christmas tree with twinkle lights set up in the corner, and the artfully folded towels. Because, somehow, she had kept hold of Villanelle’s hand from airport to shuttle and throughout most of the check-in process, and figured a bath was the only way to extract herself from the situation.

_She was in deep._

“I guess I’ll take this side, then!” Villanelle yelled.

Eve threw her turtleneck on top of the pile of clothes while the water ran; she then squirted half a bottle of bubble soap into the tub. Her hair went up, her inhibitions went down, and after a quick survey of fancy-ass, holistic looking bath salts, she got settled into the tub and shut her eyes for a moment of peace. She did not think about Villanelle’s hand in hers, and she didn’t think about how happy Villanelle looked for the duration of their journey from baggage carousel to lobby.

Eve instead thought about… dinner, because she’d had to drag Villanelle away from the overpriced airport food, but wanted to make sure she wasn’t hungry because… she… cared. Of course she did.

So why the hell was she acting like showing a modicum of emotion was equitable to decapitation?

_What was wrong with her?_

“Wow, you… adapted to the lifestyle quickly.”

Villanelle poked her head around the sliding bathroom door, already changed from her traveling comfy-casual ensemble to what looked like runway cat-burglar, in a skin-tight black turtle neck reminiscent of Eve’s funeral wardrobe, and a pair of houndstooth slacks.

“I haven’t had a proper bath in—”

“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Villanelle cut her off, rounding the corner and heading for the sink. She returned a few moments later to Eve’s side and crouched down, minimal make-up applied, but looking refreshed and perfect (as if she ever didn’t). She propped her head on a fist, took a quick moment to give Eve a stare that unsettled her, but eventually said, “I’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“Some initial surveillance.”

“Immediately after the flight?”

“Needs must.”

“But you need to rest, or… for just a little while. You’re going to—”

“Are you trying to tell me how to do my job, Eve?”

“No, but I am looking out for my Manhattan meal ticket.”

“It will be fine,” Villanelle said, flicking a bit of bubble water in Eve’s face. “You have the honor of being my only major stab wound over the past several years, so I will avoid middle-aged women—”

“ _That_ will be a challenge.”

“—with repressed anger issues.”

Eve narrowed her eyes. “I’m not—”

“Eve, I am joking. And I’m going to be careful. But… it’s cute that you’re worried.”

“I’m not worried,” Eve said, shutting her eyes and tilting her head back against the thick towel she’d propped under her neck. “Go get yourself stabbed, for all I care.”

“Awe, won’t you be jealous?”

“Seething.”

“Sarcasm does not look great on you, Evie.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Yeah, okay,” Villanelle rocked forward, dropping her hand that propped her head up. “Just remember, if I do end up dead or stabbed or bleeding out in Central Park, you’re footing the bill for the room.”

“WHICH IS WHY I SAID BE CAREFUL, YOU COLOSSAL—mmhhhh!”

This is not how Eve expected their second kiss to go.

In her head, (not that she thought about it often), they were typically covered in blood, or crammed in the trunk of an unmarked car, or hallucinating from the pain of broken fingers under duress after unsuccessful interrogation by the Twelve. It was always tense, because she’d only act on her feelings if some outside force were threatening her with imminent death or severe bodily harm. Eve had never pictured it happening easily, certainly never in the bath, with Villanelle’s soft lips against hers after one of the more comfortable trans-Atlantic flights of her life.

Shocking was an understatement.

Suddenly, there was tongue, and the silky-smooth pass of oily bath water and bubbles around her body, a hand crawling around the back of her neck.

And then there were noises, like horns honking outside and unintelligible shouting and a siren or seven echoing in the skyscraper canyon outside of the window. But, more prescient, there was the guttural, deep sort of _hhhmmmmsss_ and smacks as one kiss lingered and shifted into another, as water sloshed and mouths brushed, then retracted.

There was a _purrr_. Eve was 92% positive it didn’t come from her.

Steam climbed toward the ceiling and fogged up the mirror. The deep notes of lilac mingled with Villanelle’s perfume; a heady scent, even after a plane-ride of recycled air and gross bodily expulsions from strangers.

Everything was Villanelle, distilled into sensation that Eve had never been fully able to handle.

The idea of her, latching onto Eve of all people, as she traipsed across the world for dollar amounts unknown, offing lying husbands and political players and meddlesome private industry moguls. This mythic sort of person was kissing Eve while she was naked in a free-standing tub, surrounded by the trappings of minimal elegance and monetary excess and everything Eve was most certainly _not_.

Eve might need to rethink Villanelle’s Christmas present.

Villanelle finally pulled away, and Eve took a moment to collect herself. Her eyes still shut, lingering over the memory of succulent flesh and taste that wasn’t immediately followed by head trauma, she gaped a little.

“I—”

“I am going to be fine, Eve.”

“I—”

“I’ll text you, keep you updated.”

“But I—”

“It’s not far, and there’s no security. Just need to scan the perimeter, in-and-out, like I said.”

Eve sighed before moving away, needing to put some distance between them to get a handle on her words. “One of these days when we kiss, I’m going to know what the fuck is going on,” Eve finally managed.

“…because you weren’t aware the first time?”

“I tried to start a fist-fight. With you. On a bus. I was hardly in my right mind.”

“But you were so cute, though!” Villanelle smirked.

“And then you come in here after a long-ass flight. The least sexy of places—”

“Airplanes are very sexy, there’s a mile-high club for a reason.”

Eve snorted. “That’s not—that’s… at the end of the day, it’s still public transit, which is gross.”

“I don’t think you’re gross, Eve.”

“I don’t think you’re gross, either, I guess, but this exchange is starting to be. Can you please go do your thing so we can get dinner soon?”

“Very well,” Villanelle said, rising from her crouch near the bathside. “Far be it from me to stand between you and take-out.”

* * *

Eve had done many stupid things in her life, but she thinks tailing Villanelle in the frenzied tempest of NYC foot traffic is kind of high on the list.

Last night, after Villanelle got back from wherever the hell she went, they’d gorged on crispy New York pizza, and afterwards found themselves idling on the hotel’s rooftop bar. Eve was ready to sleep, but Villanelle insisted on getting adjusted to the time change. She bullied a married couple away from a standing outdoor heater so that she and Eve could view the skyline together. It wasn’t a bridge over the Thames, but it was multicolored, overcast, and warm, and the Hudson was a river just like any other.

Villanelle knew well enough to keep red wine in Eve’s hand for the duration of their excursion, and they spent much of the evening chatting about Villanelle’s past in North America: only a handful of jobs and mainly concentrated in Toronto and DC. Bed came without ceremony, with no further mention of kiss number two between the pair. The morning was spent in and out of stores and shops and one chocolatier where Eve indulged on toffes and dark mint, just a little, because Villanelle knew what she was doing well enough to encourage Eve to splurge with the $5k they’d swindled from Stephen back in London.

Apparently, Eve’s monster had a sweet tooth.

But then, as the day wore on, Villanelle redirected them back to the hotel, where she changed and prepped for her job.

_How long will you be?_

_Depends on transit time, but if I do it right? Sixty-seven minutes from the time I catch the subway at 23rd._

_That’s… precise._

_Would you expect anything less?_

Eve nearly ran into a pole when some asshole bodychecked her while yelling at his iWatch. God, London wasn’t great, but she’d never had good experiences in New York.

She’s wondering if this will go down like Kedrin, with how crowded and cold and chaotic the walkways are in one of the most touristy spots on the whole damn island.

A mild nor'easter had blown through three nights previous, so pockets of snow still clung to frigid concrete corners, or melted and froze again into dark patches of ice beneath the shadows of skyscrapers and flagship storefronts. There were no less than seven scaffolding rigs precariously arranged over the sidewalks, bottlenecking the masses into a dank, frigid tunnel of biting winter wind.

The temperatures did not seem to bother Villanelle.

Dressed in a Kelly green peacoat with bright brass buttons, her sleek low pony tail was tucked into an Hèrmes scarf while fluffy grey earmuffs prevented frostbite. Eve kept her eyes trained on the little blonde head that deftly navigated around the shoppers pouring out of the Saks 5th Avenue revolving doors. Overhead, a dazzling display of red and gold lights created columns and clocks and curtain designs to spruce up the exterior of the department store for the holiday season. If these streets were empty, and Villanelle was striding beneath the décor by her lonesome, arms laden with sparkly tissue paper and hat boxes and pretty pink bags, it would’ve reminded Eve of some glamorous Hollywood cover shoot. Christmas was an occasion, and Villanelle was never one to turn down an opportunity for dress-up.

Despite her own financial instability, something swelled within her. Eve wanted to be able to give Villanelle that—shopping sprees and luxuries and the kind of precious memories she’d never had the chance to make in the past. She immediately deflated, knowing she never could measure up to what Villanelle already provided for herself. But Villanelle didn’t want her for her pocketbook; if that had been the case, she’d have booked the Princess Suite and faked it through with Stephen.

Which begged the question... why, exactly, did Villanelle want _her_?

Eve waited with other bundled pedestrians at the crosswalk, shuffling along quickly to catch Villanelle as she turned and headed west on 47th Street.

So many people.

Eve had spotted no less than five NYPD officers on guard, standing near metal barricades that directed the mishmosh of tourists and city dwellers like cattle through chutes. Eve’s eyes were locked on blonde hair that disappeared into a storefront. As Eve hurried forward, a sudden burst of pedestrians crossed at another light, and she was so quickly caught up in the rush that she’d lost exactly which door Villanelle had turned into. She paced back and forth in the cold, noting the types of stores—loads of jewelry shops and banks and a three-story H&M. Patrons emerged with tiny boxes wrapped in delicate cream or scarlet ribbons, or massive bags with gaudy graphics emblazoned along their sides. Eve took a moment, checked her phone, and noted that it was Christmas Eve. No wonder everything was as busy as it was midday, despite the cold.

Just as she was about to put her phone away and cross the street, it pinged.

_Go one block north, and double back west. Meet me at Rockefeller Plaza._

Eve’s fingers flew over the screen.

_Is it done? Where did you go? How do you know where I am?_

The three dots appeared instantly.

_It’s done. I went to Rockefeller Plaza, I just told you. You are not very good at tailing people XD_

Eve rolled her eyes, and dove back into the sea of bodies.

* * *

“It’s big,” Villanelle said when Eve approached.

“It’s a fucking fire hazard,” she said, staring at the thousands of rainbow lights on the behemoth of a tree. God, it had to be seventy… maybe eighty feet tall?

“I like it.”

“Of course you do. You love shiny things.”

“Hmm, I do indeed,” she said, and Eve saw that she now had a pale pink paper bag in hand, golden tissue paper protruding from the top.

“More shopping?”

“Hardly. This was the job.”

“That bag?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand. Is there, like… some guy’s ear in there?”

Villanelle's jaw dropped, and she gave an exaggerated blink. “What exactly do you think I’ve been doing for the past two months?”

“Uh, I don’t know… evading capture?”

“Well, yes, but… I’ve been, how did you say… going cold turkey?”

Eve had a momentary flashback to the bleak, dark night with Carolyn and Konstantin, Paul’s brains leaking onto a couch not twelve feet from her. “What are you talking about?”

“I haven’t killed anyone in ten weeks, Eve.”

“Merry Christmas!” Eve said too loudly, trying to distract the horror-stricken little boy and another equally wary teenager who’d posed for a photo right beside Villanelle.

Eve dragged Villanelle over toward one of the concrete planter walls, and leaned against it. “Maybe watch what you’re saying with this many people around, huh?”

“What? Trauma makes children stronger.”

“Wow. Dasha really did a number on you,” Eve snarked back.

Villanelle lifted one shoulder in a _what-can-you-do_ gesture. Eve felt a vibration, and watched as Villanelle dug through deep pockets to produce three phones, the smallest of which was lighting up. Villanelle read her message then performed a quick scan of her surroundings, her eyes eventually locking on an older gentleman standing underneath a green and yellow flag.

“Excuse me, Eve, I am needed in Brazil.”

“What?”

“Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

Eve huddled closer to the wall, readjusting her beanie and scarf. Villanelle glided effortlessly between the bodies as she approached the row of flags lining the plaza. The tree glimmered in the twilight, casting little golden halos over the heads of shoppers and skaters. Villanelle’s halo was certainly crooked, or askew, or pick-your-fallen-angel-metaphor; but then again, she always seemed to glow in ways that made Eve feel inferior. Just like the plane, it was an eerie sort of brightness, but Eve was accustomed to playing the moth to Villanelle’s shiny exterior. The ease with which Villanelle seemed to exist contrasted so deeply with everything else Eve knew about her… it’s what kept Eve so caught up in her that the infatuation had mutated into irrepressible, unadulterated love.

As if, _‘I like you’_ on the plane yesterday had even come close to what she truly felt.

Eve knew Villanelle, she thought. Really knew her, in ways many, many others did not. Binaries and dichotomies and a multitude of contradictions were housed within one young, beaten body; Villanelle romanticized the normal, but took the extraordinary, the gore, even the reprehensible, in measured stride. She could laugh at death and cry at kindness and marvel at someone like Eve, whose own morality was kept in tentative check by societal strictures.

Villanelle was shiny, brassy, exuberant; and, despite what Eve had conditioned herself to think for so long, she really liked shiny things, too. Others were simple, home-made papier-mâché trinkets and noodle hot-glue star templates, unremarkable and familiar ornaments that one would dust off every year. Eve could take comfort in their constancy.

Villanelle, however, was a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted dagger, rammed into the trunk of a Fraser fir and ready to outshine everything else in her presence.

But beautiful things are coveted; it’s the nature of greed.

Someone would come along and set Villanelle to another, more nefarious purpose, and Eve would find herself missing something much more precious than an ornament.

If it all came down to choices, Villanelle was hers. Eve had said as much yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, all the way back to that night on the bridge. The more she repeated it, the less she believed it… not because she didn’t want Villanelle.

But on what planet, highly-organized criminal syndicate notwithstanding, would someone like Villanelle want _her_?

That wasn’t a question she could readily answer, so she focused on her own mental spiral:

It was an ethical computation; she would allow Villanelle to do what she had to do for the pair of them to make whatever was between them work. Sacrifice _x_ , receive _y_ in return. And if that meant being okay with Villanelle taking freelance hit-jobs where she delivered the severed ears of dead men to contacts standing under United Nations flags at Rockefeller Plaza, then so be it. The jobs were immaterial; the only thing that ever really mattered, was Villanelle.

Eve watched the approach; cheek kisses, a brief chat, and an affected laugh on Villanelle’s part. And then the hand-off of the pretty pink bag in exchange for a thick envelope. Soon enough everything disappeared, legerdemain on the move. There was the click of boots, then the glow of Villanelle suffused her again. And despite how bad it was for her, Eve leaned in; she’d endure the sunburn and melanoma if it meant being that close to the light. She’d grip onto that golden dagger no matter how deep the blade cut her palm.

She would gladly, joyously, die slowly.

“Done?” she asked.

“Done,” Villanelle nodded with a smile, turning to look at the rink on her right. “Would you like to go ice-skating?”

* * *

It was like riding a bike.

Growing up in Connecticut, ice-skating was a common party activity in Eve’s adolescence. And though she hadn’t touched steel to a frozen surface in at least twenty-five years, she maneuvered around the exterior of the rink for a few unsteady strides before it all came back. Villanelle took longer to get her skates adjusted, tentatively entering the rink after double-tying her laces.

She clutched the side rail and Eve came to a skidding halt in front of her.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re Russian!”

“There weren’t exactly loads of well-fitting skates at the orphanage, Eve,” Villanelle snarked back. “And even when there were I was not often allowed to go out due to poor behavior.”

“Then why did you suggest this?”

“Because it’s romantic,” Villanelle insisted.

“Oh my god,” Eve mumbled, tugging one of Villanelle’s hands between both of her own. “You’re athletic, you’ll have it in an hour.”

“And you’re going to teach me?”

“I’m going to watch you fall on your ass, and come to the realization that movies are not the end-all and be-all of how relationships work.”

“I people-watch a lot, you know,” Villanelle said. “I know how they work, but I… I don’t know… what they feel like.”

“What do you feel like right now?” Eve chanced, tugging Villanelle away from the safety of the rink wall. She felt the _whoosh_ of wind as children and adults sped by, internally grimacing at one chick in leg warmers who had no reason to be out on Rockefeller Plaza doing double toe loops.

Villanelle’s legs were shaking over the blades, and she held onto Eve’s fingers in a death grip.

“I know I’m going to fall, but I don’t care,” Villanelle said, losing her weight on her left foot as her skate slid back behind her without traction. She recovered just in time to deliver the cheesiest line Eve had ever heard: “I’d be happy to fall for you.”

“Ew. Never say that again,” Eve said, letting go of Villanelle’s hand and nearly cackling at her deer-in-the-headlights expression. “You’ve got to learn how to propel yourself. Turn the foot that you’re going to push off of to the side, don’t push parallel to the ground or your skate is just going to fly behind you.”

Eve demonstrated, angling her ankle to the side, and slowly pushing off.

“Hate to see her go, love to watch her leave!” Villanelle shouted amongst the scandalized pedestrians.

Eve rolled her eyes again, and glided backward towards her.

“My coat is literally covering my butt.”

Villanelle winked and pushed off from her skate, angled sideways, and glided for about two whole seconds before careening into the outer rink wall.

When Eve skated up beside her, plopped as she was in a well-dressed puddle, she was still glowing.

“Would you like to learn how to change feet?”

“Yes, please,” Villanelle said, taking Eve’s hand as she bent down to help Villanelle up. “Oh, there it is!” Villanelle said.

“What?”

“ _That ass_.”

“I’m leaving you here,” Eve said, releasing Villanelle’s arm and leaving her to scrabble against the wall on her own. She was halfway across the rink, Villanelle’s eyes tracking her every move, as she weaved in and out of other skaters, sped up, slowed down, chanced a quick reverse when she was about thirty feet away. She glided backwards to a stop before Villanelle, who was biting her lower lip.

“That was unnecessary,” Villanelle said.

“What?”

“Showing off. Flirting.”

“I haven’t flirted in decades,” Eve said, pushing down thoughts of Hugo, or even drunken nights with Bill, or whatever the hell she’d been doing with Villanelle for the past year and a half.

She'd think later, much later, that Niko never once crossed her mind when she thought of flirting; and that saddened her, somewhat.

Villanelle’s jaw dropped, affronted. “You wrote me a love letter.”

“It was two words.”

“Apologetic, and a pet name. Definitely flirting.”

Eve huffed out a laugh. “Come on, you,” she said, extending both of her hands to pull Villanelle into a glide. “When you’re ready to shift, remember to turn that back foot at an angle—right! Just like that!”

She skated backwards, holding Villanelle’s hands before her, as Villanelle carefully pressed her weight from foot to foot along the ice.

“So you know, it’s not very smooth since so many people are out here,” Eve said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t about to run over any one. “It’s not the best place to learn.”

“So I’m doing a good job?”

“You’re doing fine,” Eve said, twisting and shifting so that she’d turned, now skating forwards alongside Villanelle, still holding one hand. The glint of the steel underfoot still left Eve with a pit in her stomach. She tried not to picture the sheen of a skating blade hacking through ear cartilage.

“Is this what you imagined?” Eve asked, shaking herself out of the stupor.

“Yes,” Villanelle said, concentrating on her footwork. Her cheeks were flushed and her brows were furrowed. “But sometimes I think about doing the twists and jumps and holding you over my head in the pretty costumes with the rhinestones.”

“So there’s no actual training. We’re just immediately ready for the Olympics,” Eve offered.

“Exactly,” Villanelle agreed. “Can we slow down?”

“Uh-huh,” Eve said, moving to the side in front of the rest of the skaters lapping their slower pace.

“Eve?”

“Yes?”

“I would like to kiss you now, please, and I would like for you to know what’s going on,” Villanelle said. “Since that was a complaint you had last time.”

“Oh, uhm… okay?”

Villanelle pursed her lips. “Could you sound less confused?”

“Normally people don’t announce—”

“We both know I am not normal, and you said last time that you’d like to know ‘what the fuck was going on’ the next time we tried,” Villanelle explained. She nodded her head upwards toward the flags, the lights of the Rockefeller tree, and the New York skyline beyond them.

“This is what is going on: there are two men with concealed carry permits in the rink; one is wearing an orange sausage jacket and the other has on a grey wool coat. A small boy named Evan split his lip when he fell over the skater-aid roller, and his mom left Neosporin and plasters at the hotel. There are three NYPD officers patrolling the perimeter, and there are nineteen CCTV cameras within eye-shot. You are wearing your ugly maroon cap and your lovely black scarf and you’ve held my hand more in the past three days than we have touched in eighteen months.” Villanelle leaned closer, and Eve saw twinkle lights and cityscapes reflected in her eyes.

There was a lot more lingering there in the bright black of her gaze, not Christmas, but the ghosts of murders past. Except for Bill, Eve found herself caring less and less about the lost souls, wondering if the last stare they saw was the same one trained on Eve at that exact moment. Wondered if they felt scared, where she just felt a awe-struck.

“Are you aware of what is going on, now?” Villanelle asked, tilting her chin down.

Eve moved so fast she couldn’t stop herself. On reflex, Villanelle caught her by the waist. They kissed, both hot and cold and much too long for their time on the rink, until Eve possessed the wherewithal to pull away.

“We need to… we need to not be here,” Eve said.

“Are you okay?”

“There’s too many people.”

“But I—”

“Villanelle, let’s go,” Eve said breathlessly. “Please.”

“Can’t we keep skating?” Villanelle pressed, “Just a little while longer?”

Eve’s smile grew, blossoming out like poisoned perfume, or the creak of a rib cage expanding under pressure. “Sorry, baby,” she said, before skating toward the edge of the rink.

* * *

“I am so mad,” Eve said, scrolling through her phone in a sparsely-filled subway car.

It was after 8pm on Christmas Eve, and they’d just made out on every corner from the upper east side to the closest dinner spot they could find that didn’t require a reservation. It was a Creole place, something Villanelle hadn’t had before; the meal was delicious, washed down with two beers and leaving Eve’s lips spicy and Villanelle’s gaze swimming under the streetlights. Eve made fun of how bad Villanelle was at skating and Villanelle told her she was not very observant for an agent working at MI6. Villanelle showed Eve a trick; craned her neck, shifted her center of gravity, clipped her vowels, and produced a spot-on impersonation of their waiter as they exited the restaurant, leaving Eve a little dazzled. They watched families stroll in the snow as they meandered through Central Park, and Villanelle explained that strangling someone with Christmas lights was aesthetically interesting in theory, but challenging in execution.

They eventually made it to the underground where Villanelle had insisted on a selfie, like this was a damn date, and Eve was just light-headed enough to relent.

“What’s wrong now?” Villanelle asked, her eyes jumping toward the handful of people in the subway car. There weren’t many, and they were seated far enough away not to pose much of a threat, but it was reassuring that Villanelle was constantly keeping an eye out for the pair of them.

“Nothing,” Eve insisted, clicking on the stupid photo Villanelle had goaded her into taking. It was perfect and romantic and Villanelle looked in love with her, really in love with her, not, _shoot-her-and-leave-her-for-dead-in-Roman-ruins-due-to-misconstrued-ideas-of-ownership_ kind of love.

Eve harrumphed. There was really only so much she could take. “I’m not sentimental, okay?”

“Okay…” Villanelle answered carefully.

“So when we get back and have sex it needs to be like… sex, you know? Not special, first-time sex on Christmas Eve, or whatever the hell,” Eve muttered. “Don’t get giddy.”

Villanelle lit up instantly and pressed her face into Eve's neck. Eve felt her smile growing against the exposed skin over her scarf.

“I’m not going to say it,” Villanelle murmured.

“Okay.”

“But you know?”

“Yep.”

“Can I say ‘Merry Christmas’?”

“God, if you _have_ to.”

Villanelle’s lips nuzzled against her ear. Eve thought about the guy who must’ve lost his in a bright pink bag, traded quickly beneath flags flapping in winter winds. “Merry Christmas, Evie.”

“Yeah, sure. _Fine._ ”

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please enjoy murder christmas it only gets weirdly softer
> 
> i'm missy find me @southern-missy on tumblr please come yell at me about KE can't believe we gotta wait another YEAR WTF YALL


	3. Chapter 3

So the sex was incredible, or whatever. Best sex she's had in years, but hell if she’s telling Villanelle that.

She sat on Villanelle’s lap and rode her fingers until Villanelle got impatient and flipped them over, driving into her until Eve’s axons stopped sending the signals needed for verbal response; it was all reflex and tingles after a while. The bending and tightening, the shudder, and the barely-there skim of fingers along her lower abdomen left her shivering, aching for more. But the steady gentleness of the come down had likewise been fantastic, and Eve wished it had been worse, really, because she now had to compartmentalize mind-blowing sex and lush baths and delectable three-course meals and ice-skating giggles with vacant-eyed corpses and triggered, dry-heaving responses to red that was just a little too red.

All of the good, all of the amazing, had to mix homogeneously with the reverberating, jarring boom ringing in her ears, and the intense white-hot pain in her shoulder. She was becoming more and more amenable to the overlaps, but the pain flared up like a phantom in the worst of times, even when she was enjoying herself. She blinked, her lashes fluttering over the skin of Villanelle’s neck where she had buried her head, and took a moment to compose herself.

“Eve?”

She transferred her weight and turned Villanelle’s chin towards her, kissing her deeply. There were more pressing concerns in the moment, even if the multicolored lights of the Christmas tree in the corner of the suite shone just a little _too_ red for her liking. She was honestly surprised the thirty-foot tall Rudolph projection outside her window hadn’t sent her into convulsions.

Eve shook her head, trying to focus on what was right in front of her.

“Eve, are you alright?”

She moved back, dove under the covers, and kissed her way down Villanelle’s stupidly flat stomach.

“Eve, you don’t have to—oh, I… I mean—”

It was dark beneath the sheets but Villanelle was all around her in the ways that mattered, and, well… she’d always been a quick study.

“ _Jesus_ , Eve, okay—I—I didn’t—”

Eve bit her her thigh and Villanelle’s hips shot upwards. Eve wrangled a forearm overtop of them and issued a muffled command from beneath the covers: “Stop trying to talk me out of this.” She swirled her tongue over the bite and pulled one of Villanelle’s legs over her shoulder. “Wow, you smell good.”

“B-but you don’t have to—to—God, up a little— _shit_ , EVE!”

And it continued like that for a while. Eve felt Villanelle’s hands in her hair, scratching at her scalp, wondered how long Villanelle had been dreaming of tangling her fingers in Eve’s dark mess of curls. Villanelle came surprisingly quickly, so Eve placed kisses on her thighs and higher, on a hip bone, an abdominal muscle, a scar, a breast, until the taste she’d been craving for months on end became familiar and satiating, not some forbidden treat she only devoured when she felt shit about herself.

The past few weeks, she’d been feasting on the things that were bad for her. And dammit if she hadn’t thought herself into a tailspin, telling herself that if she wasn’t going to abstain then the least she could do was let herself enjoy it.

They lay together in the too-bright dark, sweat chilling on shoulders and little puffs of breath hitting salty-slick necks. 

“I don’t think you’re going to kill me, anymore,” Eve finally said, staring at the ceiling.

Villanelle’s hair was splayed across her chest, one arm draped over her waist. She felt Villanelle’s thumb rubbing circles into her hip bone. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Eve said, nuzzling into her head. “I do think… though…”

“Hmm?”

“You might not kill me, but… you’ll probably be the reason I die,” Eve vocalized, wondering if one holiday of good memories could sustain them once they were back to the gritty realities of Europe.

“You think so?”

“We can’t ignore what’s after us. You. Whatever.”

“I like us.”

Eve breathed deeply, glancing at the moonlight as it poured over a long length of bare leg thrown over her own. Villanelle’s pale skin was dappled in rainbow colors, delectable as sherbet. “I like us, too.”

“I don’t want to talk about it, now,” Villanelle whispered, holding her tighter.

“Okay. I’ll pretend I don’t know about the hand gun in the drawer.”

“Eve.”

“I _am_ observant,” she argued, goosebumps erupting over her chest as Villanelle placed a kiss in the hollow of her throat.

“After Christmas,” Villanelle mumbled, placing another kiss to her collarbone. Her fingers danced along Eve’s chest, tracing little nonsense patterns over a half-moon indent of teethmarks. “I won’t ignore it, but… this is nice, yes?”

“More than nice,” Eve admitted, carding her fingers through Villanelle’s hair. She shivered, and Villanelle tucked in closer.

“It’s snowing.”

“No,” Eve said, turning her head to glance out the window. “Ugh, of course it is.”

“Why is that bad?”

“Because…” Eve rolled her eyes, already internally gagging at what she was about to say. “It’s too perfect.”

“What?”

“This,” Eve said, gesturing a little spastically toward their current undress. “The hotel, and the skating, and the food, and you, and the snow—it’s too perfect.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t _hmm_ me, it’s unsustainable.”

“I disagree.”

“Of course you do. You’re accustomed to indulgence.”

“And you _indulge_ in custom,” Villanelle countered, which prompted Eve to release her from their cuddle and roll over on her side to face her. Eve propped herself on one elbow to get a good look at her little wordsmith.

_ Her little wordsmith. _

What the fuck.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eve felt like she was about to start some sort of aggressive cross-examination, but it was a little distracting in the moonlight. There was a semi-circle of reddish indents over Villanelle’s left breast that matched the one on her own chest. Eve had _made_ that.

They really were destined to consume each other.

“You pretend to enjoy your normal and don’t appreciate the special things—the _you_ of you. And when you do, you feel guilty about it.”

“I’ve been trying to be better, though,” Eve said, suddenly self-conscious. She pulled the sheet up higher and looked down at Villanelle’s hands, marveling at how soft they’d been.

“You have. These past weeks, you… have been trying. And you look less sick at your stomach, every time you do something that is not so nice.”

“Like take poor Stephen’s money?”

“Samantha is a lousy fuck, anyway. You did the man a favor,” Villanelle readjusted so that she, too, lay on her side, tangling her legs with Eve’s beneath the covers. “Billie though…” Villanelle waggled her brows salaciously. “A wildcat.”

“Oh, I liked Billie.”

“I could tell.”

“You still have the wig?”

“EVE!”

Eve cupped Villanelle’s jaw, ran her fingers down the slope of her cheek. “You know you’re… you’re the only person in the world I can be this way with. I’m not… not used to being the me that does what I want. For the longest time, I had to bury her.”

“And now?”

“I’m trying not to piss all over your holiday,” Eve sighed. “But it’s kind of hard, shaking off all this dirt. I might ruin the beautiful parts of it because I’m so… uh…”

“You lost me at the buried-in-the-dirt part,” Villanelle grinned. “Is this some kind of funeral rationale?”

“I’m talking about the romance of it all. Luxuriating in the good things while we have them. I’m bad at it, but you love it, and I love you, so I’m trying to… lean into it without overthinking.”

Villanelle scooted closer, tilting her head up to catch Eve’s lazy stare. “You love me?”

“Of course I do,” Eve said, not unkindly. “And for longer than I’ve wanted to admit.”

Villanelle surged forward and kissed her, slow but earnest. When she pulled away her hand drifted to Eve’s bare shoulder, fingers alighting on her neckline.

“Can I… can I say it for real?”

Eve heard the hesitancy in the question, and remembered that the last time Villanelle confessed her feelings, the circumstances had been significantly more dire. It was different now, of course, but the fear lingered. And the fact that Eve had hurt her enough that she felt the need to ask…god, they’d both really done a number on each other.

“I’m sorry about the last time you tried to say it,” Eve whispered. “I wasn’t ready.”

“Neither was I,” Villanelle admitted. “Not like the way I am now.”

“I don’t want you to feel like I’m policing you, well… beyond the, uhm, actual policing I have to do. But not—Christ, like… emotionally. Shit, I’m bad at this.”

“It’s okay,” Villanelle said. “I love you, anyway.”

“I don’t really know why,” Eve admitted. “I feel like I’m going to spend the entirety of… this, trying to figure out why you chose me.”

“I’ve already told you about the hair.”

“But what if the hair was gone?”

Villanelle looked suddenly stricken. “You’re not going to… cut it, are you?”

“No immediate plans, but I’m just… wanting to know what’s going on up there…” Eve brushed her fingers over Villanelle’s temple. “For the longest time I thought I knew, but this is different. I’m not a good liar, not as observant as you need… I just can’t figure out why you’d want to chance this with me.”

Villanelle’s hand curled over her waist, and she squeezed. “Guess we’ll both have to live long enough to figure it out.”

“And try to enjoy ourselves in the meantime,” Eve mumbled, rolling on top of Villanelle so that their bodies pressed together warmly. They kissed for long moments until a car alarm blared in the city below them, and Eve smirked. “I told you it was fucking loud.”

She could feel Villanelle smile into her shoulder. “Merry Christmas to you, too, Eve.”

* * *

“You know I normally go to the—what to call them?—soup kitchens, on Christmas Day.”

“What?” Eve asked, taking the coffee Villanelle offered to her as she settled back into the duvet. Early, Christmas morning sunlight filtered through the sliver of curtains as Villanelle traipsed about the suite in a pair of high-cut bikini briefs and a matching camisole, absolutely obliterating any remaining ounce of Eve’s composure. “Why do you go there?”

“I help people sometimes, Eve.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I can be nice.”

“You can be nice, but I wouldn’t have pegged you as altruistic.”

Villanelle scoffed, and flicked on a lamp. “It’s not so lonely there, on Christmas Day. Most of the smelly ones have showered.”

“And you’re not there today, because...”

“I’m not alone today,” Villanelle said, leaning over to peck Eve on the lips. “But we could go later. Something to do. Homeless kitchen soup is much better than Russian prison soup.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Eve said, setting her coffee aside. “So did you want to do presents now or later?”

Villanelle did a double-take, her eyes bugging as she spluttered over the lip of her mug before quickly setting it on the nightstand. She rocketed up on her knees, nearly tackling Eve in her haste to get closer.

“Okay, so that means now...” Eve rolled her eyes, and stretched over to the drawer of her bed side table. It didn’t hold a Glock, like Villanelle’s, but it did hold some brightly colored cardstock she’d printed in this place’s version of a business center while Villanelle showered. Hole-punched in the top corner, held together on a small metal ring clip, was a tiny booklet of papers. She’d stolen some raffia ribbon from one of the Christmas ornaments in the lobby and tied a sad-looking bow over the collection of papers, presenting it to Villanelle with a shrug.

“So... I don’t have a lot of money,” she began.

Villanelle didn’t seem to hear her. She was zeroed in on the package. “Can I...?”

Eve nodded, eyes glistening as Villanelle tugged the ribbon off the booklet with care. “But for some bizarre reason, you seem to think that I’m like, enough, or something, so I made you some ‘Eve coupons’.” She crawled closer to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Villanelle, and reached for the top one, neon pink with popcorn and film strip clip art. “This is a movie ticket. Redeemable one year to date,” Eve said. “Any movie you want, any time you want, and I’ll make the popcorn and get snacks and we’ll watch it together.”

Villanelle brought her fingers over her mouth, as if she could push her incredulous grin back down into her body. Her face was flushed a pretty pink and she was practically vibrating with joy.

Eve flicked to the next ticket, highlighter green.

“This is an outdoor activity card. There’s an asterisk over the top, because, well, I’m not sky diving. But I’ve got the skating down, I’ll try to hike if I have to, even though it sounds exhausting... you know, I’ll give it a shot. If you want to play tennis, or—I don’t know, go out to the beach or something, I’ll go with you.”

Villanelle placed her head on Eve’s shoulder as she flipped the next card over.

“The blue one is for food and/or cooking,” Eve explained, wrapping her arm around Villanelle’s waist. “I can throw something together, but as long as I’m not shelling out $200 bucks a pop on some golden truffle dessert, consider it a dinner date wherever you like.”

“And this one?”

“Picnic.”

“The yellow?”

“Walking tour, or the zoo. The one in Budapest is attached to their botanic gardens, so... I don’t know, could be nice.”

“You... what’s this one? It’s—“

“A late addition, after last night,” Eve rolled her eyes at her signature, which she thought had been cheeky at the time, but with the way Villanelle was looking at her now, it seemed extremely sappy. “For sex.” She didn’t elaborate.

“Even if you’re mad at me?” Villanelle asked. “Whenever I want?”

“I mean... within reason.”

“When has reason ever been sexy?”

“Reason keeps us from getting killed, which I think is seriously sexy.”

“I don’t know,” Villanelle said, biting her lower lip as she placed her present further down the bed. “Some might say it’s not reasonable to follow a killer for hire into her hotel suite.” She placed her hands on the tops of Eves thighs, pushed them apart, and hovered above her. “Or give them thoughtful presents. Could be Stockholm syndrome.”

“I’m pretty sure I’d have to be like... captured or something for that to apply.”

“You don’t think I caught you?” Villanelle asked, dipping down to place gentle kisses along Eve’s jaw, then along the line of her throat. Her hand trailed behind her mouth, coiling and uncoiling around Eve’s neck. Eve bit her lip and hissed, unable to contain her reaction.

Another time.

“No…” Eve murmured. "I think you've got me right where you want me.”

“Hmm, that I do.”

“So… no present for me then?” Eve teased.

“After," Villanelle smirked, and wiggled under the covers.

Eve was all too happy to wait her turn.

* * *

“Are you ready for your present now?” Villanelle asked, putting the cap back on the bottle of water she’d just drained from the mini bar.

“That—“ Eve put a hand over her naked chest, feeling the heavy rise and fall lessen in severity as she caught her breath. Little had she known she’d be participating in one of the more athletic interactions she’d ever had on a mattress this Christmas morning (not that she was complaining). “That wasn’t it?”

“Ha! No, but I will make a mental note that you enjoyed that,” Villanelle said with a wink. She slipped from the bed and Eve watched the swish of her hips, traced the outline of her naked hourglass figure as she dug through her bag and pulled out a gift wrapped in shimmery golds and greens. “I do have a lot of money.”

“ _Ughhhhhh_.”

“But I know that makes you... uncomfortable, so I got you something small. I don’t... I don’t know if you will like it, but...”

Eve sat up and let the sheets pool around her waist. “I want to see it.”

Villanelle handed Eve the box and didn’t wait to watch her open it. Instead, she returned to her cold coffee, abandoned in lieu of more amorous shenanigans. Eve tore through the paper as Villanelle pressed a few buttons on the microwave, reheating her cup.

Eve noted the way Villanelle wrote her name, the cursive loops familiar now.

**_To: Eve_ **

**_From: Villanelle_ **

It was such a simple thing, the little sticker attached to the gift wrap, but the address felt intimate in a regular sort of way, in a way that made Eve feel like she could balance the insanity of international investigation with Tuesday taco night at a shared apartment. She imagined Villanelle leaving a sticky note on the refrigerator that let her know she’d be gone on a job in Belarus for a week, to call her on the burner. Not to worry, because she’d recently met up with a guy in Mossad, who was going to help her. It was such a little, typical thing, the kind of detail Eve was so used to wanting and Villanelle wanted so badly to pretend to be.

And yet they both were there, appreciating the banality of ink on glitter adhesive, and finding a way for it to work in the general disorder of their lives.

Like Villanelle had said back in the dance hall:

It was actually kind of nice.

She tried not to catalog Villanelle’s nervousness, her inability to remain beside the bed as Eve used her nails to pop the scotch tape holding the box top and bottom together. Villanelle was in the mini fridge searching for creamer when Eve removed the tissue paper and gasped, met with a simple sketch filled in with watercolors of... her.

Framed in a small picture window on the cover of a a light brown, leather album, the title EVE STUDIES was written in elaborate calligraphy. Eve opened the cover and felt her stomach tighten, faced as she was with her likeness in pencil, thin pen lines, or an impressionable mix of watercolor. There she was in grey among London buses in the rain, or soaking wet in front of a kitchen refrigerator, her bare legs wilting down from a skinny, scared-looking frame covered in a collared shirt, attached to a sweater. There was another sketch missing her face, just a series of squiggles and shading that came together in what was undoubtedly her hair on one of her more harried days, voluminous and untamable. There she was in her shitty apartment, a glass of wine in hand. Then, just a sketch from the shoulders up, details of her neck and face with her hair wrestled into a top knot.

Another of her standing, a green splotch of a champagne glass in one hand, a gash of watercolor grey in the other, little red drops dripping from it.

Blood.

From her own dagger, seemingly inseparable from the limb drawn as her arm. Perhaps Villanelle had her own thoughts concerning ornaments and daggers, too.

Eve was relieved not to find a sketch with a large red axe. Instead, at the end, there was a detailed multimedia piece of her with another, taller body, dressed in bolder colors with long blonde hair. They held each other against a red and gold background. If Eve didn’t know better, she’d have thought it was a painting set at Christmastime.

“You’re very good,” Eve said, turning pages back toward the front, soaking up Villanelle’s attention. Eve didn’t know much about art herself, but there were so many sketches and paintings in the book... Villanelle had to have worked on this for weeks. Months, maybe.

“Of course you got the hair just right.”

“Thank you. Do you—“

“I love it,” Eve said. “It’s very thoughtful.”

“Good.”

“Hmm. This one is my favorite,” Eve said, turning to the last page of the pair of them. “If we ever get settled, I’d like to frame it.”

“Why?”

“... so we have our picture together? Because it’s beautiful?”

“Really?”

Eve carefully leafed through all the pages, shaking her head in astonishment. “Because it’s my gift and I can point to it whenever I want and think, ‘hmm, Villanelle made that for me’. Because, I... I think we’ve seen that we can’t be together all the time, safety and all... but having something like this to hold onto... I don’t know. It will make me feel better.”

“Eve, you said you weren’t sentimental.”

“Well, I lied,” Eve said, beckoning Villanelle back to bed. “I seem to do that a lot when it comes to you.”

“Still don’t trust me with the truth, yet?”

“Not so much you as... anyone in general,” Eve answered. “I told you. You’re the only one I get to be all of me with. Give me a little time to adjust to the newness of it all.”

Villanelle climbed back under the covers. “Are you crying?”

“Yeah, a little. But you are, too,” Eve said, pressing the pad of her thumb to a tear on Villanelle’s cheek. Her other hand gravitated toward Villanelle’s abdomen, where she stroked the jagged, raised edges of Villanelle’s scar. Of course, the only two people in the world who would find that romantic would be them. Just like they’d mentioned months ago. “God, what the hell is wrong with us?”

“I think we might be happy,” Villanelle answered. “Maybe for only a little while, and maybe out weird version of whatever happy is, but... I am very, very happy, Eve.”

Wrapped up in the warmth, Manhattan beyond and their own little watercolor world between them, Eve was happy, too.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“I can’t promise you a nice flat,” Eve said. “You saw how shitty my last place was.”

Villanelle quirked an eyebrow from where she lay, arms wrapped around Eve’s torso. “What?”

“Or a fun job. I’m in and out of favor so much, And even when I like investigating, it’s not necessarily fun. It’s really stressful and fucking exhausting.”

“Do you think assassination and grand larceny is any simpler?”

“No, not necessarily, I just thought that... you told me what you wanted, in Paris. Nice flat, fun job.... someone to watch movies with. I can only do, like, one of those things.”

“...and live with the part of me that’s killed scores of people.”

Eve kissed Villanelle for long moments, not wanting to leave her hanging after such an assertion. She took her fill of touch, trailing fingers and tongue and the tip of her nose over different sloping parts of Villanelle’s body, staying put as long as her restlessness would allow. She eventually stood from the bed, needing to move, needing a snack that could actually curb the rumble in her stomach. Dragging the sheets with her, Eve headed straight for the minibar. She ripped open over-priced pretzels and popped the top off an individual serving of Dom Perignon, felt the bubbles burn like acid down her throat. Villanelle padded up behind her carefully, taking her sweet time as she draped her arms round Eve from behind.

“Mentioning the killing stuff…was that too soon?”

“No,” Eve said, pressing a kiss to her temple. “Just a... a lot to process. You live your entire life thinking you’re one thing and then one year of craziness changes it all. Not for the worse, though,” Eve qualified. “I keep telling myself this is what I want. And it is. You, this, us. And I think you know—how you think one way, when everything, the world, family, friends—they’re insisting it isn’t right, that you behave another way. You just… had to face that a lot earlier than I did.”

“I never formed the habit of behaving myself.”

“So you’ll grant me a little leeway as I unlearn that?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, I hardly screamed when you passed off that guy’s ear in the baggie under the flag yesterday.”

Villanelle stole her champagne, cut her a dubious glare as she upended it, guzzling it all in one go. “What are you talking about?”

“Yesterday. Your job.”

“The necklace delivery.”

“The necklace deliver—wait. That wasn’t some sort of… body-part drop off?”

“Huh?”

“The pink paper bag.”

“Oh! Villanelle said. “No fingers or noses there. Just jewelry.”

“... jewelry?”

“Yep. We were in the diamond district, did you not notice?”

“You knicked some jewelry for that old man?”

“Not just any jewelry,” Villanelle insisted. “And don’t say ‘knicked’. It belittles the enterprise.”

“What did you take? Is that why you were dressed like a sexy cat burglar for surveillance the other day?”

“What was I wearing?” Villanelle asked, feigning ignorance. “If I knew you thought it was sexy, I’d wear it more often.”

“Ha! It was the turtleneck.”

Villanelle blew a raspberry into Eve’s shoulder. “Of course it was.”

“But you were... what? Arranging to steal a priceless ring, or something?”

“It was a necklace, and it had a price. Nearly half a million dollars, to be exact.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know,” Villanelle said. “He still had to pay, of course, but seventy-five grand is a lot less, and I made him spring for upper class to get us over here.”

“He paid you seventy-five thousand dollars to steal a necklace?”

“It was his 60th Christmas with his wife, and he lost all his money in the housing bubble. He just wanted to impress her,” Villanelle pouted.

“Bullshit!” Eve laughed

Villanelle smirked. “It’s Christmas, Eve, I was feeling sentimental in my backstories.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know why he wanted it,” Villanelle said. “And it’s not my job to care. But he paid me, and we’re set, at least for a little bit.”

“Until the Twelve—“

“Eve,” Villanelle pressed her finger over Eve’s lips.

Eve kissed it, and blinked away her concerns. “Sorry,” Eve said, pulling Villanelle into her. “Frank, he... he called me a ‘tiresome think bucket’ one time. My head, it just—“

“I love your head, I love the hair on top it if, and I love the way you like to plan,” Villanelle said. “I know you don’t see it much, but I plan, too. Probably as much as you, I just don’t let you know, ruins the mystique. But sometimes... the lows can be extremely low. Can we not enjoy the highs while we’re able? Enjoy the respite while we have it?”

“I can’t promise I’ll always be able to,” Eve said, “but I do promise to try.”

“It’s more than anyone else has ever promised me before,” Villanelle said, maneuvering them back toward the window. Snowy rooftops and relative silence welcomed them. Eve watched as their breaths fogged up the glass before her, and it took all of her crumbling restraint not to write their initials on the humid glass.

“Could you go another round?” Villanelle asked, nibbling Eve’s ear.

“Not with my bare ass against the window for all of Chelsea to see.”

“And deprive the citizens of New York of the most special Christmas surprise?”

“Fuck me in the bed like a civilized person,” Eve chastised.

Villanelle responded with a growl and gripped her beneath her thighs, rotating and pressing backward until she picked her up and shoved her back into the wall. The curtain fell closed behind them, but blues and greens and yellows dappled Eve’s skin with starry, prismatic patterns.

“You’re pretty as a picture on this wall, though,” Villanelle murmured.

“…here’s fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope yall enjoyed this fluffy xmas fic 
> 
> ive got more holiday thoughts on them but think this could be a good place to conclude. drop a line if inclined and happy holidays to all who celebrate :D

**Author's Note:**

> does anyone else remember that one scene where carolyn's boss yelled at her? no? just me? okay well here she is for plot.
> 
> i've literally written 12k words of banter with some xmas shenanigans thrown in we'll see how this goes


End file.
